


The Dimension Where We Live

by Oroburos69



Series: Drawn That Way [2]
Category: Batman (Comics)
Genre: Fourth Wall, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-17
Updated: 2010-04-17
Packaged: 2017-10-26 15:50:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/285073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oroburos69/pseuds/Oroburos69
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>To live, perchance to know, ay, there’s the rub. For in that knowledge, what meaning lies?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Dimension Where We Live

He wakes to pointless luxury.

He stands, shaking off the hidden aches of infinite injuries, drawn to the clock struck twelve. Ten: forty-seven, combination lock hidden in the gears, releases the hidden passage.

Reset the time, enter, become.

Batman stands, shoulders twitching, armor sliding into place.

The Joker is free, escaped again from old Arkham. The bright yellow symbol cuts clean (impossible) lines from the smog.

Drive in from the mansion on the hill, survey the city. No fires tonight. Park in a warehouse, five locks on the door. Escape to the roof and run toward the only light in the sky.

The commissioner waits, hands tucked in the pockets of his long beige coat. Words: Joker, free, factories in the North.

Disappear as soon as he looks away, run north and finds—

The factory district is filled with ugly brick buildings, most of them crumbled and fractured, never repaired after the Cataclysm. Their windows are broken, wind whistling through them. Once, this was a place of production and industry, poorly paid jobs for vaguely legal workers. Now it is weathered and empty.

Gotham no longer produces. Cataclysm drove company after company away, leaving an empty hole where industry used to be. The tight environmental laws pushed through by Wayne Co. discourage investment, and the city languishes, half filled, mostly unemployed. Gotham is a middle man, a port of call, an importer, an exporter, a dock and little more.

The streets are empty, flat grey plains bordered by equally grey buildings. Batman creeps along the rotting roofs, listening for sounds of life inside the abandoned walls. There are no sounds of life, only the jolting sway and creak of unstable architecture under his boots.

They see each other at the same time, the Joker sitting on the edge of the roof, smiling, still smiling.

“Do you remember?” Joker asks, smile falling away but his teeth still bared. He doesn’t have enough flesh to cover them.

Batman thinks maybe and doesn’t know why. He charges to engage in the fight.

“No?” the Joker questions mournfully, smile still gone, his face skull-like from the lack. “What to do, what to do…?” he murmurs, dodging away from each blow a second before it lands.

“Oh Bats,” Joker says, and it’s a curse in his mouth. “Why is it that you cannot catch me?” He darts away from a punch, limbs flying uselessly in the air. “I am not a fighter, and yet you don’t even touch me. Why, Bats, why?”

Batman slows, confused, before beginning again, kicking at the man who is no longer there.

The Joker sighs, and shakes his hand, a length of pipe sliding out of his sleeve and into his palm. “I hoped, you know.”

“Hoped what?” Batman asked, the niggling sense of ‘not right’ growing. He dodged back, putting distance between himself and the Joker.

“That you would remember.” The pipe spins between his fingers, and Batman doesn’t understand because it is not a threat, or a joke, or even spoken with the Joker’s usual violent joy.  
“Remember what?” he asks anyway, watching the pipe spin.

“How old you are. How long we’ve been doing this song and dance.” The Joker shrugs, his thin shoulder rising under a bright purple jacket.

Batman pauses, memory battling at the corners of his mind. He remembers—decades.

“Ah!” Joker crows, his gaping smile returning. “You are remembering again!”

“It’s impossible,” Batman denies, déjà vu slithering though him.

The Joker laughs. “Oh no, I’ll show you impossible.” He pushes the pipe up his sleeve, and heads across the roof to the access building at the top. The metal door opens to shadowed stairs, and the Joker walks in. “Come on,” he says.

Batman follows, his hands tied by the knowledge that he has forgotten something. Something important. The stairs lead to a door, strangely featureless. His eyes slide away from it and land on the Joker, and he nearly punches him before remembering.

The Joker’s smile looks almost sane. He grabs for the door handle, but there isn’t one, even though there had been. The Joker smirks and pulls a crowbar from the same sleeve he’d gotten the pipe from.

Batman comes close to hitting him then, remembering Jason. But Jason had come back. The memory twinges oddly, and he withholds judgment for the sake of demi-present intuition.

Joker pulls the pins from the hinges, and topples the door toward them.

Behind it lies a bright room, the edges sketched in with pencil lines. Batman pauses, staring at the unrelieved white. There are no shadows, no light sources. He steps back, and realizes that the room shines no light into the shadowed hallway.

“When I came in,” the Joker said, walking on to the outlined walkway, “There was nothing behind the door. The walls were plain white, no corners, no floor, no ceiling.”

“What is this?” Batman asks, following the Joker at an uneasy distance, his boots making no noise on the white floor.

“It’s being drawn,” the Joker replied. He sits on the edge of the rail, thumbs hooked over the parallel lines. Batman can see his hands though the gap. The Joker sits on nothing.

“Who’s drawing it?” Batman questions, thinking of a new enemy, knowing it’s not.

“I don’t know,” the Joker says. He sounds far too solemn. “I’ve found places like this before—not often, but lots more after the quake.” Joker smirks for a second. “Come in further,” he invites.

Batman steps forward, clearing the threshold. The lines stay the same, not adjusting to his change in perspective, and the effect is nauseating. Another step, then another, and the lines disappear, replaced by ones that fit his new position. “Did you drug me?” he asks, unable to explain it in any other way.

“Will you stop asking that?” the Joker says in exasperation, sounding normal, unlike himself. More like—

Batman’s eyes widen as he remembers a rotting house down by the sewage treatment plant. “You—last time—”

“You’ve remembered?” the Joker asks hopefully.

“Yes. Why did I forget?” Batman realizes that his growl is gone, replaced by Bruce Wayne’s voice. It’s eerie in the echoless room.

“Everyone does, to some degree.” Joker pauses, and smiles. “You less than anyone else I’ve met, if that’s any consolation.”

“Not particularly,” Batman answers, jolted by the sound of his voice. He shouldn’t speak—he doesn’t speak with the mask on.

The Joker sways peacefully on the rail. “Touch the walls,” he suggests.

They feel like fine paper. Pulling back, his hand moves in short, rapid jerks, as if it’s under a strobe light. A soft scratching noise reaches his ears, and he glances over, seeing bricks being drawn onto the walls.

“Strange, isn’t it?”

Batman reaches toward the rail that the Joker sits on, fingers being stopped by an invisible force. It’s flat, not curved as he expected, and he glances toward the Joker, looking for an explanation.

“Everything here is flat, in line with where you are.” The Joker raises his hand and holds it out to Batman. “I’m not sure about us, though.”

Batman reaches out, touching the Joker’s hand. It has the same texture as the wall, and as he runs his fingers up, he realizes that there is no depth to the Joker, despite the illusion of perspective. It’s like touching a cardboard cutout. The Joker pushes his hand forward, but Batman feels no corresponding movement under his hand.

“That feels—odd,” the Joker comments, smile dropped from his face.

“It looks odd,” Batman agrees, frowning. “What is this?”

“It can’t be explained.” The Joker jumps off the rail and lands on the ground. It crinkles. “It’s not—real. Nothing is. If you remember, and you try, you can feel the paper when you touch other things, things that look real.”

Broad splashes of color begin to cover the walls, dark reds and browns.

Joker stretches out, yawning. “Soon this place will be done. It’ll look real when you come back.” He hesitates, “We’ll probably forget as soon as it’s finished. It’s a lot easier to think clearly without the shadows.”

“And then what?”

“Then we fight. We always fight.” Joker heads down the stairs to poke at the newly colored walls, his movements as stuttered as Batman’s had been after he touched the wall. He laughs, and looks up. “Sometimes, if you look, you can see writing next to things that are making noise. Sound effects.”

Joker opens the door to the outside, and a burst of air swirls around the forming interior. The door squeaks, and for a second Batman sees the word _CREAK_ next to the hinges.

“Outside, you’ll feel more real,” the Joker promised, his trademark smirk falling into place, “But your actions here are more your own.” He leaves, closing the door behind him.

Batman stays, fingers holding on to the invisible flat rail until wet color turns it gun metal grey. The warehouse is complete.

Batman rushes out the door, irritated that the Joker has managed to get away again.

The night outside is darker than the city lights should allow. Refraction and reflection ignored, the continuous nimbostratus smog shows sharp edged lines of light from the spotlight welded to the roof of the police station. To the clouds, there are no lights but this.

Harsh black outlines contour every shape, the world made into ink. Jagged yellow script writes out the sound of the Joker’s dwindling laughter.  
 _  
It isn’t real._


End file.
